How Humans Created Countries

There is a line on the floor at passport control. If you dug under it, you would find nothing. So where did countries come from? The first one wasn't a king or a flag. It was a system for counting grain. Here is how humans went from 300,000 years without borders to 193 countries, passports, walls, and one patch of desert that no country will claim. In this video: what life looked like before any country existed, how grain and taxes helped create the first cities, why writing began as accounting, the first recorded border fight over a canal, why the story of 1648 is mostly a myth, what the law says a country is, how a man built a "country" on a sea fort, where passports came from, who really drew the lines in Africa, India and the Middle East, the human cost of lines drawn in a hurry, and the strange land between Egypt and Sudan that nobody owns. Chapters 0:00 The line at passport control 2:17 300,000 years without countries 4:04 Grain, Uruk and the first cities 6:49 Writing began as accounting 8:41 The first border fight: Lagash vs Umma 11:46 The 1648 myth 13:33 What counts as a country? 14:45 Sealand: a country on a sea fort 16:03 Where passports came from 18:01 Who drew the lines on the map? 20:33 The five-week border 22:38 People with no country 24:54 Bir Tawil: the land nobody wants 27:07 Back to the line Sources Wikipedia: Uruk; Cuneiform; Mesilim; Stele of the Vultures; Hadrian's Wall James C. Scott, Against the Grain (Yale University Press, 2017) Osiander (2001), Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth, International Organization Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933) Alesina, Easterly and Matuszeski, Artificial States (NBER working paper) Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa (via CEPR VoxEU) Britannica / Wikipedia: Berlin Conference; Sykes-Picot Agreement; Radcliffe Line; Partition of India League of Nations: Paris Conference on Passports (1920); Nansen passport (1922) UNHCR: Global Trends, statelessness figures Migration Policy Institute: The rapid proliferation of border walls (Élisabeth Vallet) UN: Member states of the United Nations Wikipedia: Bir Tawil; Jeremiah Heaton; Principality of Sealand #history #countries #borders #didyouknow #explained